November 9-13, 2015 - Isabel Nowak

Our last unit was unit seven, and it's main focus was balancing equations. In order to help us visualize balancing equations we made before and after particle drawings, or we just continued to add on the elements until they were equally balanced on both sides. We were either given the compound of the reactants and products or we were given the word description and had to first write the equation and then balance it out on both sides. By balancing the equation we had to insert the proper coefficient that would balance both the reactant and the product. I found that just adding onto the element to even out the reactant and compound was way more helpful than doing particle diagrams, just because I felt it was more organized and you could see it better than having to switch on and off using different colored pens to show the different elements. This unit tied into other units that we have done in the past through using the element and compounds and recognizing the molar mass, and watching for the ionic and molecular compounds that we did in unit six. At first my weakness of this unit was fully understanding how to balance an equation if you have an even amount of a compound on one side verses a odd number on the other side of the compound. Mrs. Hetter just taught me that you have to just keep going back and forth and that it's just basically the common multiple of the two. So that helped a lot because my first instinct of every compound like that was to find the common multiple and then the other compounds revolved around that compound that had to be balanced out. A strength that I think I had this trimester was being able to do the word problems since we did that last unit and so putting together the equations was super simple, as well as just catching onto this unit. I feel as if we jumped into it super quickly and it was kinda just presented in front of us the day after the test and once we completed the nail lab and nobody really knew how to do it, and it was just a free for all. A lab we did was going around the classroom and doing multiple experiments and basically seeing the reactions and balancing them out. Such as the copper and wool experiment. Something I would've done differently in this class was probably study for the tests a little more. I underestimate some classes, and either way I know I test terribly. Most the time I do know the content but once it's on the test I freak out a little and my brain goes blank and also some things are worded differently. I think that this course was kinda fun, it was pretty basic. But nothing new with the way that Skyline presents their science program. Nobody really took white boarding seriously and I think that was a waste of time. Half the time my group didn't know how the labs were related to the unit at all either. I think that the blog assignment was pretty cool, I've never had a teacher that's used blogger. But at the end of the week, reflecting on what I did in chemistry and having to get out my worksheets and go over the content briefly was pretty helpful. Some recommendations that I would give this chemistry class would to be using our class time more efficiently. Every time we did white boarding we would take all hour to 'wait' for everybody else and our table would be done in five minutes, and that's how it was for all groups. Then the next day we would white board the answers and I don't think it was really useful for anybody and it was just another day of procrastinating. Some more positive feedback would be doing the experiments. I think we did more experiments in this chemistry class than I've done in previous ACIS science classes.